By Bimbola Oyesola 08033246177, [email protected]
The Association of Senior Staff of Banks, Insurance and Financial Institutions (ASSBIFI) yesterday raised the alarm that over 80 percent workers in the financial sectors are casuals.
President of ASSBIFi, Oyinkan Olasanoye speaking at the monthly forum of Labour Writers Association (LAWAN) in Lagos.
lamented that casualization is one of the major problems confronting the union presently.
“The percentage is as high as 80 percent and for that reason, we have issue with casualization. The labour act make provision that there should be contract staff but our position is that those contract staff should be allowed to have dignity of labour and adequately compensated,” she said.
She also maintained that casual staff are being used for most of the fraud carried out in the financial sector. According to her, this happen as a result of bitterness and because they are not adequately compensated.
She said, “It is easy for them to be used as trojan horse, so some of the fraudulent activities taken place in the sector today is easier because some of them are not professionals. They have reasons to be bitter because they are not well trained”.
Olasanoye also noted that the sector recorded a decline in productivity as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, which affected their targets.
She stated: “You know we work in a private sector and some of our employers felt what matters to them is profit and COVID-19 pandemic created a lot of issues that disturb us from getting necessary expectations of our target.
“It might please you to know that majority of us ignorantly signed some company policies that specify at the end of every year after appraisal, the least performance without quantifying what makes a least performer will be eased out based on productivity.
“So it means that if in a department, we have 10 people and 9th person score 99 percent and 10th person score 98, the person that scored 98 percent will need to go. These are some of the policies of those banks we are struggling to work on”.
ASSBIFI President said the sector’s industrial Sector collective agreement has not been renewed since year 2017.
“We have a collective agreement that is renewable every two years, the last one was 2015, but because of individuals institutional policies that ran fowl of our collective agreement it has been very tough for us to renew the agreement,” she lamented.
She added that the association had came up with a policy that was labour-friendly which the casual workers will not be used and dumped, saying with the policy they cannot be easily disengaged.
Olasanoye equally commended the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) over the recent ban of sale of forex to bureaux de change and restrict forex sale to commercial banks only, describing as a good policy.
According to her it was long overdue, though she expressed fears over the implementation.
She said: “We commend the Central Bank of Nigeria recent ban on the sales of forex to BDCs.
“This is necessary because over the time we are concerned that BDCs have allowed themselves to be used for graft. They have turned themselves away from their objectives.
“However, we are concerned over the implementation. As we all know, one of the problems we have in this country is policy inconsistency.
“This is because if care is not taken, some BDC will still be operating illegally, hence, there won’t be adequate control. And this may lead to scarcity of forex.
“If this happen, it would create some challenges in the market as commercial banks might not be able to meet the forex demands of importers and this can negatively affect the forex trading market.”